They are going to kill us

They are going to kill us. Our kids are going to kill us. Not just because they wake us up, mid-hangover at 5.30 on Saturday morning or keep us up all night with their well aimed groin kicks while "co-sleeping" (a form of sleep deprivation torture that the UN is currently considering declaring to be a war crime). At the very least, it's a Trade Practices Act breach; "co" implies "together". Only one party is sleeping. The other two are trying to sleep, in between being maimed and wondering if they could just about manage to get a whole uninterrupted hour on the dining room table.

No, they are going to kill us when they find out the truth. Today's post is brought to you by the letter P and the number 17.

What do pop stars, porn stars and parents have in common (other than the letter P)? We are all good at presenting the most preposterous lies in a sincere and believable way. Tell me that this lyric makes any kind of sense:

We're the ones who flirt with disaster,
On your ass we'll pounce like a panther.
Cut the bullshit out with a dagger,
With a dagger, with a dagger.
Do or die we all gonna stay young,
Shoot the lights out like a machine gun.
Think it's time for a revolution,
Revolution, revolution.

It's drivel but, put it into the mouth of a pop star and an auto-tune machine and you've sold a million copies to teenagers who are fooled into thinking that it's something deep and meaningful.

Porn stars are the same. No one has sex like that. No one. Or at least not for that long. Or that big. Or that loud - the neighbours would complain - right after the kids woke up and wandered into your room to find out what all the fuss was about.

And parents - what's our particular brand of poppycock? Enter the number 17 and our new word "Preparation"

Chatting to my 3 year old's childcare teachers the other day, they were telling me about the importance attached to preparing the students for school in their curriculum. Teach them the alphabet, how to write their own names, how to count to an arbitrarily high number. All this, presumably, so that they can sit, bored rigid in their kindergarten class (or start down the path to long term, boredom-induced behaviour problems) because they already know everything that they were going to learn anyway.

Kindergarten is, in turn, a preparation for year 1 where you will really need to know which way round a 'b' goes, what the number 13 is for and how to get to the toilet before the catastrophe strikes.

And so on up the line until primary (elementary school - for my North American readers) is over. In total, primary school is supposed to prepare you for high school.

And you arrive in high school, well prepared to actually get on with living your life - you've got skills.

No. What you're there for is to be prepared for a working life or, given the state of the employment market for people that have had only a mere 13 years of formal education, for tertiary education of some kind. Don't worry about finding your passion or exploring the world around you, just do the exams to prepare you for the next step - ideally a step up into a very nice university whose role it will be to ...

That's right, prepare you for the working world.

Seventeen years from start to finish. Seventeen years of exams, assignments, dull drudgery and uninspiring education (unless a particularly motivated teacher can slip some into the classroom in a brown paper bag and hand it out, like the drug dealer in the B-block boys toilets, when the curriculum authorities aren't looking). Seventeen of the best years of your life devoted to being prepared.

When they find out what we've prepared them for, they are going to kill us.

Welcome to the working world. It's dull. It's uninspiring. Your skills are not going to be even recognised let alone used. And you'll be doing the same thing all day, every day, 48 weeks a year until you can't work any more.

If I was them, I'd kill us too!

A writing lesson

If you work in any business more sophisticated than bumming around on the beach, at some point you are going to be punished for your many sins by being asked to write a risk management, change management, disaster recovery or staff management plan or some other equally pointless document. Usually, someone will give you a sample document that they picked up off a website somewhere and thought - but not for too long, they just wanted to spend a minute or two on making it look like they had researched the task before giving it to you - might be a good basis to work from.

And it will probably be a bit daunting; 30 odd pages, lots of text and diagrams, flow charts, arrows and the like.

But panic not! With a little help from me, and a bit of exposure to a church, you can knock this kind of job over in no time. Let's use a risk management plan to illustrate.

Part 1 - The Creed

Open with a statement like "Management of risks is crucial to the success of a modern business. Compliance with ISO 9001 on Risk Management helps to ensure that ..."

This is the statement of faith, of what your company believes, what it truly, sincerely believes other companies want it to believe. It doesn't mean anything or, if it does, the statement is so self-evidently true that you might wonder why anyone would bother making it. However, this Creed covers off the bit on the corporate website where it says "We are committed to contemporary risk management best practices". Most people reading the document won't get past the Creed because, seeing a statement like that above, they can nod sagely to themselves, reassured that you are one of the faithful.

Part 2 - The priest's greeting

You need to get risk management into the context of your particular church company. You need to show an awareness of the environment that your company works in and its particular needs. But you're like the relieving minister here, the locum - you have no idea what kind of environment the company works in, you just got given the task because you annoyed the boss. Don't stress, however, because no one actually understands the business environment - it's just one of those pieces of knowledge that management pretends to have over you, thus justifying their obscene salaries - so you cover your bases here with something like:

"ACME operates in a rapidly changing, high risk environment in which increased pressure from globalisation creates a high risk operating ecosystem."

Again, doesn't mean anything but is true enough of any business (except, perhaps, waste management because I can't see the Chinese wanting to take over our crap) that you can use it as an opening sentence without worrying too much that it won't be accurate. Follow it up with something about the corporate structure and highlight how the fact that you're a small / large / diverse / unified / local / global enterprise makes you particularly vulnerable to the risks of modern business. Note the use of the word "ecosystem" there. Doesn't mean a damn thing outside biology but using it makes you sound like you're at the forefront of research into the corporate patois.

Part 3 - De Profundis - "Out of the deep"

Time to get profound and to show your readers (those few who have made it this far) how you intend to get to grips with the real framework of the concepts for thinking about managing people to help them manage risks. You need a strategy!

Open with a statement of what the strategy is supposed to achieve, framed in terms to make it look like the ends and the means not only justify each other but are, in fact, the same thing.

"ACME will take a strategic approach to risk management to ensure that the priority risks are identified, validated, prioritised and options for treatment developed in a timely manner to help ensure that steps are taken to ..."

That's just an outline of the generic approach to solving any problem, nothing really profound but, boy, doesn't it sound good?!

Notice that I've used "help ensure" again there? Very important! If the brown stuff hits the air conditioning, you can't be blamed. You promised you would help to ensure and help you did. You weren't on the hook to actually ensure anything.

And you need a circular diagram. Looks like this (zoom in to read the text - it's worth it)

No one really cares what the words are but it must start with something like "Initiate", must include terms similar to "Analysis" and "Review" and must end where it began - implying a culture of continuous improvement.

In fact, what will happen when the cyclist falls off the wharf is that you'll all react in a blind panic, do whatever it takes to get her back on the bike, the bike back on the path and then, in a moment of joint relief, have a cleansing ale. There will be no analysis or review, just doing and boozing. The absence of reality in the document is not only not a problem, it's truly expected.

Representing your strategy as the arse end of a duck - which is probably closer to the reality of yelling "oh shit" and then winging it, is not going to fly here.

And the Great Circle need not be limited in use to risk management. Analysis, production, teaching, learning, driving, sexual intercourse; anything can be represented on the Great Circle - just tweak the labels a bit. What it says is really obvious but, because it's presented as a Visio chart with coloured arrows and 3D boxes, under the heading "strategy", it looks deeply profound.

Part 4 - Scripture

You need a reference to Holy Writ. What you're looking for here is a standard. And, believe me, there's a standard for everything. Just Google one up. ISO is the best because it looks to the reader like your company is using the same thinking as the Fortune 500.

Dig out a few excerpts and put them in the middle of the page in a little grey box including a really complex reference at the bottom. Something like this.

 No one is going to read what it says or, if they do, notice that you've taken the quote out of context; they'll just assume that the document was written by an expert and that they must know what they're talking about. Preachers use this approach all the time.

Part 5 - Appendices

Even if the most diligent and bloody minded reader has gotten as far as the end of the strategy section, they will not read the Appendices. Nobody reads appendices. It's the bit in which the researcher includes endless tables of incomprehensible data - usually stuff that his kids made up - to lend credence to the rest of the content. This works to your advantage.

If you absolutely must put real numbers in around response times, output levels or performance measures, do it here. But make it complex. Make it statistical. Put it in twenty different tables and endlessly cross reference them.

You are home and dry, my friend, home and dry. If you're ever challenged on detail or concrete implementation options, tell them that it's all in the appendices and that you don't have time to go into the detail right now, you have an important document launch rehearsal to get to!

Baby children, adult dogs and teenage girls - got to love them

There! That's a title that will get someone's attention thinking that I've gone off the deep end. But not so. Well, at least not in that way. I went off the proverbial deep end in other ways years ago; I am the father of four children.

Why should one love this particular trio? What do they have in common?

At this point, I think we'll break out into a Monty Python moment and start singing "he's going to tell, he's going to tell"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2Y7_1dILlQ


"No singing!"

The one thing they have in common is that they will diss you like no-one else. Watch an adult who is "good with children" trying to get the attention of a baby. If they don't offer food or whatever form of entertainment is attractive to the infant in that 20 second slot of their attention span, the baby will dismiss them with a look; a look that conveys all the contempt of ... well an adult dog or a teenage girl.

Baby dogs just want to play. Anyone's a friend if they are happy to wrestle and don't mind bone-deep puncture wounds from hypodermic teeth. Adult dogs are over all that. If you're not offering food, a stick or a humping opportunity, you'll get the a glance, a blink and the head will turn away in search of someone who just has something more to offer the company at this point in its development.

I'm not even going to pretend to know what it takes to avoid the explosive sigh of disgust  (is there a word for that? If not, there should be) and turning of the head from teenage girls; they are beyond mysterious. And I say that with a degree of current competency in the area - my daughter's 15 this year. And, yes, I own a shotgun, a rocking chair and a supply of grass stalks to chew on.

These don't sound like loveable qualities. Can you imagine the nightmare of a job interview conducted by a panel of teenage girls? You wouldn't get past your carefully prepared, corporate-wank-word-rich introductory remarks before you got the explosive sigh, a maliciously directed chew of the gum - in your general direction - and an excellent view of the sides of their heads.

But at least you know where you stand with them. They like you or they don't and you know it. As a grown adult - or at least someone masquerading as one - I'm not allowed to do that. When someone is explaining their moronic opinion to me or presenting me with a train-wreck on paper masquerading as a set of plans for their dream house, I'm not allowed to just blink and turn away. I have to pretend interest. And they have to figure out, from the little hints in my body language and the slightly sarcastic nuance in the way I say "that could work" that there's an implied "if the laws of physics were fundamentally different" and a "please stop talking now!" in my responses.

And, if you're a bit deficient in the people-reading department (in fact, given to confusing one person's face from another a fair bit of the time), this is a nightmare. Apparently it's a skill most people evolve naturally as they grow up - no need to make it another one of those things that teachers have to cram into their precious hours of classroom time - but, if it's something you have to do consciously, then you wind up with your eyes darting all over the place - like a 15 year old boy's at a Free The Nipple parade - trying desperately to find the little hints and tips that tell you to stop talking because, apparently, most people tire of the effects of relativity on GPS satellites after only 15 minutes.

People are so strange!

PS: How about "Hofell (n) The sigh or grunt of disgust emitted by a teenaged girl when the thing or person in her contemplation is just not cool or interesting enough.

Growing up

The underlying assumption common to capitalism and children is that we will grow forever. My three year old, for example, is convinced that not only is he already big (go on, I dare you to call him a "little boy") but that he will continue to get bigger until he is, to use his phrase "all the way up the sky". That said, he also currently believes that if he puts both arms out in front of him and ties a length of flowy material around his neck he will, should he propel himself from a precarious height, be able to fly; I'm not putting too much faith in his prognostications at the moment.

Of course the tragedy is that, we get to early adulthood, and realise that the sky is more than the limit and that even the compromise destination of "all the way up the roof" is a bit much to hope for. Even for those of us of a lanky disposition, regularly bruised forehead from low doorways is far as it's going to go. Oh, and, the occasional threat of decapitation from low flying ceiling fans.

That's not to say that we don't get any bigger. Without regular exercise and the gradual surrender of Nutella, KFC, hot chips, biscuits, margarine, alcohol, peanuts and, in fact,anything other than All Bran and apples, we will keep the slave-labour trouser manufacturers of Bangladesh in employment for the rest of their lives as we bloat out until an after-dinner mint is a life-threatening experience.

And the same seems to be true for capitalism - at least my personal experience of it. I've kind of got everything. All my needs - other than fat free, full taste Nutella and a teaspoon - have been met and I don't even really want for anything much. The thrill of need/want satisfaction - which used to come from saving up for something and working oneself up into a state of anticipation that made monthly date night look like instant gratification - now comes from getting an annual pair of glasses on the health fund and that "new phone feeling" once every two years.

And, on that, kudos to Telstra (Australia's largest telco) - or at least their advertising agency - for not only trying to sell us the "new phone feeling" as a need to fulfill but also trying to convince us that the environment will revel in the unnecessary packaging that such a flagrantly superfluous purchase necessitates:

I'm a bad citizen, I think, The new commandments, given unto us, are

1. Work to generate value; and
2. Consume

Neither of which are particularly interesting or fulfilling in their current form. In fact, they are oddly self-contradictory. I don't really have time to consume (or, rather, to hand out money so that my kids can consume - I don't think parents are allowed to have pocket money) because I spend my time at work rather than my money on unnecessary goods and services. Work requires my attendance - if not my actual effort - at least 8 hours a day. Add to that prep time - which includes fighting the reluctance to get out of bed at all, fighting the desire to stay in the shower for most of the morning then preparing the meals that I can't be at home to consume - and deprep time - unpacking the remnants of said meals, pondering why I thought I (or my children) would really eat that much fruit during the day (yet again), washing and ironing work clothes, school clothes and childcare clothes (which seem, against all reason, to have gotten elephant spittle on them, which is bloody hard to remove) and sleep and there's not too much time left to do any actual spending.

I've grown up. As previously noted, bloat is the only real option for me from here on in. I fear I may need to become an apostate of the modern economy. Not quite sure how one becomes an economic atheist but, as knowledge is currently fat-free and fulfilling, I may have to do some research.